What about the Iraqis?

The news media are full of reports about the US administration repeatedly denying that it has any plans for a quick exit from Iraq. The very repetition of these denials, now almost on a daily basis, suggests that things have reached a tipping point in that troubled country. Even if the US is not about to "cut and run" but merely "walks away quickly" with its 140,000 troops, it is clear that the Bush administration has no strategy to achieve the objectives it set for itself in Iraq. "Winning", it seems, is no longer an objective; minimising losses is. And yet, the body count mounts.

While the exit question has got saturation coverage in the western media, there has been only a passing focus on what the war in Iraq has cost the Iraqis themselves. Controversy has been raked up by an epidemiologic study, done by doctors from Johns Hopkins and published a few days ago in the British medical journal Lancet. This says that more than 650,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the war""and the stated margin of error could take the number from as low as 400,000 to as high as 950,000. Even the lower limit would be about nine times the official US figure of Iraqi deaths, at about 45,000, and would account for more than 1.5 per cent of the population. In parts of the country, says the study, between 7 per cent and 10 per cent of Iraqi males have died.

Then there is the economic cost. Another study suggests that the war has cost Iraq a massive percentage of its national income. If the pre-war conditions had prevailed, the study estimates that Iraq's benefit from the oil price boom would have caused its economy to grow 12 per cent annually, instead of the 3 per cent that it has achieved""and all 3 per cent is explained by the inflow of aid. Without that, the economy has been static. In other words, while the US may count the cost of the war as being roughly 1 per cent of GDP each year, or about 5 trillion dollars so far (the Bush administration fired someone early on for putting out one-fifth of that number), this is nothing in relative terms when compared to the price that Iraq has paid.

In short, while President Bush has been declaring that "freedom is on the march", what the Iraqis have got is a level of death and destruction that is worse than the worst nightmares. One account says the number of dead in the country, relative to the size of the population, is equivalent to one 9/11 catastrophe every month for nearly four years. Yet, these will not be the issues that determine the US course of action, which will be driven by the fact that the war has become ever more unpopular at home. And whether the departure comes in weeks or months, the US will leave behind an almighty mess""perhaps even a state of civil war between the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. While that is a tragedy for Iraq and will create a new centre of conflict in West Asia (Palestine might begin to look like child's play in comparison), the implications for the world oil market are almost as serious, since Iraq has among the world's largest reserves of oil.